Listen to the sound of silence

How well do we know ourselves? In asking us to get to know each other, Rick Henry Christopher’s Getting to Know Each Other Game also tests how much we know ourselves. Check it out, and you will see what I mean.

Preference is a great way to understand personality, and is the basis of the Myers-Briggs model, for instance. Do we prefer silence or background noise, chaos or control? The answers you give to these questions will say something about your personality, but what?

The chaos vs control question reaches to the heart of the human condition. Who can resist a bit of wilderness? Yet what is the first thing a gardener thinks about when they see that unruly weed poking up through the lawn, the flower border, or the snail advancing on their seedlings? The chaos is also in our minds, it’s what makes us creative. We dream up fabulous stories, beautiful verse, in our chaotic imagination, before we tame the beast and render our thoughts into ordered and structured language.

Do please check out Rick’s game. If only to hear his lovely and inspirational singing voice in a specially re-engineered music video from the 1980s.

What is my preference?

Chaos or Control

Has to be the chaos of those moments of creative productivity, though I try to act with calm control. Like most people I also function through structure.

Silence or Background Noise

I’ll come back to this.

Crowd or Solitude

I am always nervous in crowds and still recall with trepidation, my mum walking me into a bustling street market, as a small boy. Yet nothing scares me more than spending too much time alone. I need the warmth of human contact more than anything.

Bright or Dim

Nothing beats a bright sunny morning, except perhaps the bliss of a dark, moonless, clear night sky. A rare opportunity to see the brightness of the heavens in all their spangled immeasurable glory.

Observer or Participant

Always participant, though not if we are talking audience participation. I used to hate it when pantomime actors would ask us kids to join in. Quiet observation is also important, and one of the best ways to learn. This is particularly true when we are trying to write authentic characters into our work.

Fast Pace or Slow Pace

Slow and steady wins the race and is, at my age, the only option. Traffic gets faster and faster and, even on the sidewalk, I feel so vulnerable to joggers, cyclists and e-scooters. I find busy London stations particularly difficult and frequently feel the need to raise my forearm to prevent someone running into me. No consideration for us old folk.

Open Door or Closed Door

“My door is always open,” is something a senior director once said to me, when I was a young employee. The second time I tried it, he made it clear that he didn't mean the comment to be taken literally. I soon learnt that senior directors are so full of shit.

Yet, taken as a metaphor, it has to be open door. Though always nice to close the door on wild weather and settle down to a cosy evening. You can take this literally, or figuratively, too.

Logic or Emotion

Logic has its place, but I find it an uninspiring branch of philosophy. There are much better realms of reason. And logic can be faulty, as can emotion, hence the astronomic number of people (myself included) who have at times sought clinical help for one or other affective disorder. Emotions, however much a blessing, can be a kind of chaos at times, and one that we may need to bring under control.

Talk or Listen

People around me often seem so fast to talk and slow to listen. Which is one reason I hate committees. At social gatherings, I sometimes find it hard to join in a conversation. Some say I am a good listener, but are often misinterpreting my silent, frustrated, bored, but polite, apparent attentiveness for something it isn’t.

Routine or Variety

Variety is the spice of life but spice is used to lively up a bowl of bland vegetables or disguise the off-flavour of putrefying flesh. As someone who lives mostly off a modest pension income, I find that my ‘almost’ retirement requires a routine to keep the variety functional.

Silence

Is something we never experience. Not sure if even the profoundly deaf face a silent world. Silence is something I tried to describe in poetic form a while back but am uncertain whether it worked. However much external sound is blocked out, we still hear the movement of air, our own breathing, pulse and tiny little sounds we often miss. I guess that silence is something that only comes to us at our death. But of course we can’t experience it then.

Quietness (rather than silence) is something to strive for. That quiet reflective stillness that is so hard to attain. Perhaps not the sound of silence, but the feel of the quiet and the still. If only for a moment.